‘Dark Tourist’ fails to shed light on extreme travel’s shortcomings

In 2012, on the 26th anniversary of the evacuation of Pripyat, the city at the heart the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, I boarded a bus with a group of tourists and headed out to the site of the disaster. I had a vague notion of writing about the anniversary, which had been marked a day earlier by Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, whose government was at the time being criticised for not adequately supporting victims. Before we were even out Kiev, however, I had a rather different article in mind. I was surrounded by too many weirdos not to.

“[W]hat they want,” I wrote later of my travelling companions, “is to give their fashionable architect friends back home the impression that they have done something very dangerous by coming here and walking around. They spend the day posing in front of anything that looks even remotely derelict, holding up the German-made Gamma-Scouts they purchased online especially for the trip, and making sure there are no Norwegians in skinny jeans and blazers in the background to ruin their photos by suggesting – as every decontamination checkpoint on our way out of the zone will later prove – that the protective suits are unnecessary and none of us is in any sort of peril.” The piece was eventually published in the now-defunct Global Mail.

Some people have the pain in one part; others have the pain around the forehead, around order cialis online the eyes or at the back of the head. Moreover, Ayurveda uses the laws of nature to stay young, healthy and beautiful forever. cialis samples The gallbladder performs important tasks that affect buy levitra canada the body’s overall health and digestion. Touching sildenafil 25mg and intimacy heighten our enjoyment of life. New Zealand journalist David Farrier doesn’t visit Chernobyl in his new Netflix series Dark Tourist, which was released in full in July. He visits Fukushima instead, though you could have fooled me, so similar does his experience appear to have been. The smiling, selfie-taking millennials, the nonchalant tour guide, the nervous questions about lunch. All are deeply familiar. The only real difference is the fact that the tourists Farrier travels with in the series seem rather more like concerned global citizens than the ghouls who accompanied me.

Read the full article on The Monthly’s website.